We are excited to announce Bechtle as one of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day sponsors!

Bechtle is close to its customers and is one of the leading IT companies in Europe with IT e-commerce companies in 14 countries. Bechtle also has a network of partners to meet the needs of global customers. Bechtle support more than 70,000 customers from industry and trade, public sector and financial market in their digital transformation and offer a complete range of IT infrastructure and operation services.

Bechtle is strongly committed to enhancing digital sovereignty, speciality in the public market. They championing open-source solutions and strategically operate services within European data centers to ensure the highest standards of data protection. Active engagement in the public sector, marked by successful collaborations with federal and state authorities, showcases Bechtle’s understanding and capability to meet the unique IT requirements essential for governmental operations.

This collaboration underlines the strength of the partnership between Nextcloud and Bechtle. Both strive to deliver secure, compliant, and effective IT solutions across various sectors.

We invite you to join the conversation with the forward thinkers of the global IT. Nextcloud Enterprise Day takes place on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany.

About Bechtle

Bechtle is a renowned German provider of IT services and solutions founded in 1983. It has since grown to become one of the largest IT service providers in Europe. The company serves a diverse base of customers businesses, government offices, and educational institutions. Bechtle’s portfolio of services includes IT consulting, software and hardware procurement, system integration, and managed services.

Bechtle is a leading ambassador for digital sovereignty. For many years, the company has been promoting technological independence as an fundamental part of the digitalization strategy. Bechtle have supported multiple organizations on their path towards digital sovereignty with a vendor-neutral portfolio of solutions and consulting services, as well as a European cybersecurity stack.

Bechtle is a company with an impressive history and a prominent position on the European and global IT landscape. We are fascinated to welcome Bechtle as an Enterprise Day supporter.

About Nextcloud Enterprise Day

Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.

From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.

The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.

The post Bechtle: a new sponsor of Nextcloud Enterprise Day 2024 in Frankfurt appeared first on Nextcloud.

Federation offers a self-hosted solution to the challenges posed by centrally controlled public cloud applications by letting users communicate and collaborate between independent servers and even independent apps. In this article, we explain how federation works and what federation tools you can already use in Nextcloud, and discover how it can help businesses and governments achieve digital sovereignty.

Federation offers a solution to the challenges posed by centrally controlled public cloud applications by letting users communicate and collaborate between independent servers and even independent apps. In this article, we explain how federation works, what features you can use with federation in Nextcloud, and discover how it can help businesses and governments achieve digital sovereignty.

Whether you’re new to federation features or already familiar with them, let’s start with the basics.

Understanding the federated internet

It’s a well-known fact that on-premises software offers more autonomy compared to public cloud tools in several ways, largely due to the level of control organizations have over their infrastructure and data. Self-hosting is a definition of decentralization in the realm of collaborative technologies. An important question arises when considering self-hosting: how can we collaborate effectively using decentralized software?

The answer lies in federation – it’s the key to making decentralized collaboration possible. To understand federation, you need to ask yourself – how does email work? Email is, in fact, federation in action: it operates through a network of independent servers connected via standard protocols and allowing users from different domains to exchange messages with ease via single client.

Or take Mastodon, a federated social network where each instance is a separate server run by an independent entity or community. Each user can sign up on an instance they prefer, and then follow, reply to, or message users on other instances, making communication across the entire network seamless.

In Nextcloud, user’s Federated Cloud ID works similar to an email address or a Mastodon handle, allowing them to exchange data across servers: share files and and collaborate on documents, communicate in group chats and make audio and video calls.

Federation and digital sovereignty

Federation enables private users, organizations, and their departments to use independent infrastructure, hosting their software locally with customized security and compliance measures. Each entity operates its own platform while staying connected to a larger network that supports cross-server collaboration. This decentralized architecture reduces reliance on a single service provider. It also frees you from vendor lock-in, allowing you to choose a trusted provider and work with the software that meets your needs, all while retaining the ability to collaborate seamlessly across different platforms.

Regulators are responding to a growing backlash against big tech firms from users who perceive their behaviour as market abuse, with the term ‘malicious compliance’ being used. This trend causes a growing interest in decentralization technologies.

Frank Karlitschek

Nextcloud founder

Finally, self-hosting with federated features gives you full ownership and control over your data. You choose your own encryption and own access controls, or get more flexible where others can’t, pursuing only your own compliance objectives. Companies and governments can avoid numerous risks by not having to store data under unfavourable regulations, break free from the privacy terms of large cloud providers, and enjoy freedom without being controlled by foreign entities.

Federation in Nextcloud

In Nextcloud Hub, it is already possible to do a lot when it comes to federated collaboration, as we mentioned above. For example, you can share files across servers and even collaborate on them, while federation in Nextcloud Talk enables you to join group chats and run meetings on another server.

Besides better security, easier compliance and more independence, there’s also convenience: you don’t need to send invites or create guest accounts, or set up your own on somebody’s instance. Just use your own account and stay within familiar interface of your home platform — you won’t even notice any difference.

Sure, there are certain limitations, for example, you can’t create private federated chats in Nextcloud Talk yet. But we already support many essential and handy features like polls, markdown and user mentions. And federation in Nextcloud constantly evolves as we explore more abilities of the Federated Cloud Sharing API.

How to configure federated features in your Nextcloud Hub

If you wish to configure and manage federation tools in your Nextcloud, you need to enable the Federation app and follow a few easy steps:

1. Enable the Federation app.
2. Allow your users to share and receive files from other servers.
3. Create a list of trusted servers to enable federation features for them.

Read our documentation for detailed instructions on enabling federation features and federated sharing, and creating federated conversations in Nextcloud Talk.

Federated calls and more amazing features in Nextcloud Hub 9

With Nextcloud Hub 9, we introduced federated calls in Nextcloud Talk, as well as multiple other exciting features across the entire platform. The latest update lets you stay connected like never before
— with new automation features, Nextcloud Whiteboard, new tools in Nextcloud Assistant, improved Nexcloud Mail and Nextcloud Calendar, and much more.

New to Nextcloud? There’s no better time to try it out! Get control over your data today with the most secure open-source collaboration platform.

Get Nextcloud Hub 9

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 9 here!

Download

The post Federation: a foundational concept for digital sovereignty? appeared first on Nextcloud.

We’re excited to announce another sponsor for the upcoming Nextcloud Enterprise Day, scheduled to take place on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany. We are delighted to welcome IONOS, one of our respected partners, as a sponsoring partner for this event.

The strategic partnership between IONOS and Nextcloud is centered on enhancing security, transparency, and data sovereignty through the consistent application of open standards and open-source software, strengthening the collaborative relationship between our organizations.

Register for the Nextcloud Enterprise Day today at a limited special rate.

About IONOS

IONOS is a top European digitalization partner for SMBs. With six million customers in 18 markets, they provide worldwide accessibility and a comprehensive Web Presence & Productivity portfolio, serving as a convenient ‘one-stop shop’ for digitalization needs. IONOS enables customers to host their own Nextcloud server within their secure, trusted and certified data centers.

IONOS and Nextcloud share a lasting and dynamic partnership, established upon shared goals of enhancing security and boosting transparency. Our collaboration is grounded in the utilization of open standards and open-source software, reflecting our shared belief in the rights of customers to scrutinize the code, pinpoint any security gaps and adjust as needed.

Both IONOS and Nextcloud are firmly committed to raising awareness around the crucial issue of data sovereignty. Our common conviction is that organizations should – and indeed can – reclaim control over their data. This conviction forms the basis of our partnership and this sponsorship.

About Nextcloud Enterprise Day

Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.

From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.

The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.

The post Announcing IONOS as a sponsor for Nextcloud Enterprise Day 2024 in Frankfurt appeared first on Nextcloud.

About the updates

The updates include a number of important bug fixes and performance optimization, as well as other improvements in Nextcloud Hub 7 (28.X) and 8 (29.X). Update for Nextcloud Hub 9 (30.X) is coming soon! You can find the full changelog on our website.

Updates are available for:

• Nextcloud Hub 7 (version 28.0.11)
• Nextcloud Hub 8 (version 29.0.8)

Nextcloud Hub 9 is our latest and greatest!

Nextcloud Hub 9 lets you stay connected like never before: federated calls, auto-magic with Nextcloud Flow, collaboration through a new medium with Nextloud Whiteboard, a big design redo and much more!

What’s new in Nextcloud Hub 9:

• Federation: Edit documents and have video calls with users from other Nextcloud servers!
• Automate and digitalize enterprise processes
• Brand new design improvements
• New Whiteboard app
• AI reminders & summaries in Mail
• PDF templates and form API
• Chat UI for Nextcloud Assistant

Get Nextcloud Hub 9

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 9 here!

Get Hub 9

Always keep your server up to date!

Nextcloud’s minor releases primarily focus on addressing security vulnerabilities and functionality bugs, avoiding major system overhauls that could jeopardize user data. Keeping your server up to date is vital, and our approach to testing and validation ensures that upgrading to minor releases is generally smooth and reliable.

For mission-critical Nextcloud systems in enterprise settings, consider switching to Nextcloud Enterprise. The tier provides you with ultimate deployment confidence: direct access to the Nextcloud engineering team, full assistance throughout deployment and integration, and peace of mind for system administrators. If you’re responsible for maintaining Nextcloud in your setting, this option may be the ideal solution for you.

The post October maintenance updates for Nextcloud Hub 7 and 8 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Welcome the new sponsor of Nextcloud Enterprise Day 2024 — OVHcloud. By becoming a sponsor of the Enterprise Day, OVHcloud reinforces its position as a provider that values privacy, security, and open-source standards, offering solutions that empower organizations to maintain control over their data while leveraging the benefits of cloud technology.

The 2024 edition of Enterprise Day takes place on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany. Register today at a limited special rate.

About OVHcloud

OVHcloud, a global cloud provider, offers scalable and flexible web hosting, server, private and public cloud solutions for businesses, developers, and individuals. With a commitment to data autonomy and transparency, OVHcloud enables efficient IT infrastructure management while advocating for privacy and innovation.

OVHcloud’s dedication to digital sovereignty reflects in their approach to data protection and privacy. They ensure that the infrastructure and services comply with local and international data regulations, which is crucial for clients concerned with data jurisdiction and sovereignty, especially in sectors like public services and healthcare.

We are honored to have OVHcloud as a returning sponsor of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day.

About Nextcloud Enterprise Day

Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.

From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.

The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.

The post OVHcloud joins as sponsor for Nextcloud Enterprise Day 2024 in Frankfurt appeared first on Nextcloud.

Sometimes you need to illustrate graphically what words cannot convey. And with a digital whiteboard tool, you don’t need drawing or design skills to do that. Read on to discover Nextcloud Whiteboard, a brand new app among Nextcloud’s collaborative tools launched with Nextcloud Hub 9.

Nextcloud Whiteboard, an online digital whiteboard

Digital whiteboards, just like their analogue predecessors, are useful in many settings from a classroom to a busy team meeting. For instance, you can use a whiteboard during a brainstorming session to sketch, map out strategies, or visualize workflows. Or assist your project planning by outlining project timelines, assigning tasks, and tracking progress. Whiteboards are also essential to online teaching and training, allowing educators to make lessons more engaging and dynamic by providing a space to interact, annotate, and visualize concepts together.

With Nextcloud Whiteboard, you can do all of that within your own secure environment and while enjoying seamless integration in your file system and video conferencing tools.

Nextcloud Whiteboard is a collaborative whiteboard tool featuring hand-drawn style that is based on Excalidraw app. It lets you enjoy lots of editing features and support for images, web embeds, shapes and other objects. You can easily save and share entire whiteboards and separate sketches to share ideas or invite your team to work together. Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of our Nextcloud Office bundle that features various universal collaborative tools for editing and data processing in Nextcloud Hub.

Infinite canvas and a variety of instruments

Nextcloud Whiteboard has unlimited canvas, meaning that you can create as many sketches, schemes and illustrations as you need, all in one file. You can invite dozens of users to collaborate with you and let them enjoy their own space on the whiteboard, or move from one task to another without having to wipe clean your valuable ideas.

Many elements, including simple lines, shapes and texts, are designed to resemble hand drawings, adding a relaxed mood to your whiteboards and letting you create freely without worrying about perfection. What matters is your ideas and an ability to express them, and Nextcloud Whiteboard has plenty of tools to make that possible.

Create a digital whiteboard from Nextcloud Files

Where do we start? No need to look for the Nextcloud Whiteboard icon on your toolbar — it opens automatically when you create or open a whiteboard file. To start using Nextcloud Whiteboard from your file system, you just need to create a new whiteboard file from your “+” menu.

Launch a whiteboard in Nextcloud Talk

Want to work in a whiteboard during a Nextcloud Talk call? You don’t need to go looking for a blank file — just create it right from the attachment menu of the chat. As usual, you can pick one of the available templates to save time coming up with the structure. Once created, the new whiteboard appears in the chat, accessible to all participants.

Host engaging, interactive meetings

We introduced Nextcloud Whiteboard integration features in Nextcloud Talk to enable a variety of new ways to use our video conferencing platform. For example, you can turn your meeting into a virtual classroom or organize an interactive online workshop. Thanks to infinite canvas space, you can use one whiteboard for many different tasks, no matter the scale and number of collaborators.

When you open or create a whiteboard file from the attachment menu, Nextcloud Whiteboard will open the canvas in front of you, without showing it to other participants in your video stream. To join you in editing, they need to click on the whiteboard file inside the conversation and activate their own editor. Now you can start collaborating in real time right inside your group chat, or present your digital whiteboard to others live (make sure to try the Laser Pointer tool!).

Create free drawings

You can draw anything with a hand drawing tool and apply settings like line color, automatic background fill type and color for drawn objects, opacity, and stroke width. The brush is dynamic: it reacts to your motions and drawing speed as you draw, making it look and feel like a real hand drawing!

Build and customize shapes

To save time drawing your schemes and sketches, you can use one of the available shape presets: rectangle, diamond and circle. Once created you can adjust the shape’s appearance by configuring its settings in the left panel.

You can also save shapes and other objects to your personal library to reuse them later, or add shapes created by other users to Nextcloud Whiteboard from Excalidraw library.

Draw schemes with lines and arrows

Arrows and lines in Nextcloud Whiteboard give you a lot of freedom. You can stick them to other objects to preserve scheme structure no matter how you change their positions, bind them freely and as many times as you wish, and even add labels.

You can create a straight arrow or line quickly by pressing your cursor and simply dragging the arrow’s end. To create a complex, bound arrow or line, click on the starting point once to begin drawing, and then lead your line by clicking on each location where you want it to bind. If you hover it near an object while drawing, you can stick it to that object in the desired place.

Perform various actions with objects and lines

You can perform various actions with drawn objects and lines. For example, adjust multiple stroke and shape settings, change color, duplicate them, add hyperlinks, and more. You can also click on an object to rotate, resize and reshape it the way you want to, and even move the pivot points of your lines.

Once your digital whiteboard grows complex, rearranging your objects and sketches might become difficult (and messy!). But Frame tool has got you covered — you can enable it from the right menu of the top toolbar and group any objects you desire in a frame to perform bulk actions with ease.

Type and format texts

Using text tool, you can add any texts to your whiteboards. If you don’t like the default hand-drawn look of the font, you can change the font family to Normal or Code. You can also change the text alignment and opacity and, of course, it’s color. Don’t worry if you made a typo — texts stay editable after saving.

Embed pictures and videos

Using image tool, upload an image or simply drag and image file onto the whiteboard to add it to your canvas. You can also add videos and other web objects using the Web Embed tool from the rightmost drop-down menu of the toolbar.

Save and share your digital whiteboard

You can quickly export your whiteboards and even separate objects as JPG or SVG images to share, embed, print or upload them anywhere you want. Just click the small menu icon on your left and export your content as an image with desired display settings. You can also simply copy it co clipboard to quickly share it in an email or chat without downloading.

You can share your whiteboards in Nextcloud Hub to team members or external collaborators to invite them for collaboration or demonstrate your ideas, just like you share any other files. This is possible with the sidebar share menu where you can choose recipients, secure your link with passwords, set expiry date and apply other protection settings, instantly share the file via email, and much more.

Be connected with Nextcloud Hub 9!

Nextcloud Whiteboard is only one of the exciting new apps and features released together with Nextcloud Hub 9. With the latest update, Nextcloud Hub lets you stay connected like never before
— with new automation features, federated calls, new tools in Nextcloud Assistant, improved Nexcloud Mail and Nextcloud Calendar, and much more.

Note: Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of the Ultimate tier of Nextcloud Enterprise. Contact us to get a quote. Learn more about Nextcloud Enterprise on the dedicated page.

New to Nextcloud? There’s no better time to try it out! Get control over your data today with the most secure open-source collaboration platform.

Get Nextcloud Hub 9

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 9 here!

Download

The post Collaborate on digital whiteboards online with Nextcloud Whiteboard appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt is approaching, and we are thrilled to announce a new keynote speaker — Felix Gebauer of Schleswig-Holstein state administration. Read below to find out more about the the speaker and the exciting session.

• Speaker: Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein German state administration
• Keynote title: Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud: Driving digital transformation through collaboration, automation and artificial intelligence

This topic will explore how Nextcloud is driving digital transformation in Schleswig-Holstein’s government, exploring several examples including new ways of collaboration, process automation, artificial intelligence and the OZG (Onlinezugangsgesetz) implementation.

About the speaker

Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost state in Germany. Part of the State Chancellery of Schleswig-Holstein is the Central IT-Management department. They are responsible for the provision and operation of the centralized IT infrastructure for the whole state administration. They’re made up of 25,000 employees – one including Felix Gebauer, the Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software.

Mr. Gebauer is responsible for the successful implementation of Schleswig-Holstein’s open source strategy. It’s his job to introduce Nextcloud as the new key collaboration platform to the state administration and ensure its roll-out of Nextcloud.

“The main reasons for choosing Nextcloud were the wide distribution of Nextcloud especially in public administration, Nextcloud’s strong and active community, and the wide range of different collaboration features within Nextcloud which provide solutions for many use cases in Schleswig-Holstein’s state administration.”

Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein

Building a digitally sovereign AI for the public sector

As part of the AI strategy of the German state, they are collaborating with Nextcloud to create a generative language model for the state administration that is adapted to the specifics of administrative texts. Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery Dirk Schrödter backs the collaboration in a statement:

“In the future, we will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to the use of existing AI services. Because, the administration of the future will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way. To make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools. This also creates value and jobs in our domestic digital economy.”

Dirk Schrödter, Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery

About Nextcloud Enterprise Day

Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.

From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.

The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.

The post Nextcloud Enterprise Day speaker spotlight: Felix Gebauer from Schleswig-Holstein appeared first on Nextcloud.

Based on this provision, the Bundeskartellamt can prohibit companies which have such positions of power from engaging in anti-competitive practices.

As you might be aware, in 2021 we assembled a coalition of like minded European tech companies and filed a complaint with the European Commission’s antitrust authorities. There has been virtually no movement on that for years. We also filed a complaint with the German antitrust authority, which in 2023 announced the start of an investigation to determine if Microsoft might have a lot of market power. After a year and a half, they are now at that point. An investigation thus has not been started, but the doors are open for them to look into the actual behaviour of the tech giant from Redmond.

3 years of more anticompetitive behaviour from Microsoft

In the mean time, Microsoft has increased its anti-competitive behaviour. The company proceeded with integrating OneDrive deeper into Windows and making it harder to use Windows without OneDrive account. It also blocked attempts by Nextcloud to gain access to interoperability API’s that would allow Nextcloud users to save files to Nextcloud from Microsoft Office apps. And it accidentally uploaded user files to OneDrive even if those users didn’t want it to do that.

The European Commission has made little progress on the complaint we filed. Interestingly, a later complaint by another American big tech firm, Salesforce (Slack) about Teams bundling with Microsoft 365 did result in a relatively prompt investigation.

Quoting our CEO and founder, Frank, from our press release:

“Over the past three years, Nextcloud has submitted extensive documentation and other evidence of anti-competitive behavior by Microsoft. The Federal Cartel Office today determined that Microsoft has particular market power. This is an important step to prohibit future anti-competitive practices by the US company.

This is an important step forward, and we look forward to an investigation.

The post Germany recognises Microsoft as tech giant appeared first on Nextcloud.

Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013 were not only revelatory but also catalyzed a necessary discussion around mass surveillance and yet Constanze argues we’ve since lost momentum in this critical conversation. She expresses concern that, as the public has become increasingly complacent, the intelligence services have grown even more powerful and influential.

“We are in the age of mass surveillance. The problem is most of the public doesn’t discuss it anymore, and that its really a problem because what Snowden did was not only revealing, but also driving a debate. And we don’t have that debate anymore, and that really frustrates and concerns me.” – Constanze Kurz

We reflect on the changing landscape of hacktivism and investigative reporting, and how policy is struggling to keep pace with modern technological advancements.

Constanze also reminds us that there’s still much work to be done in addressing the pressing issues facing us today – from mass surveillance and data protection to predictive policing and platform capitalism.

Episode Links

• Constanze Kurz – Wikipedia
• CCC – Choas Computer Club
• netzpolitik.org
• Data Broker Files: How data brokers sell our location data and jeopardise national security
• Edward Snowden – Wikipedia
• CITIZENFOUR – A film by Laura Poitras
• 10 Years After Snowden | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• The case of Edward Snowden – National Whistleblower Center
• Snowden Archive – The Intercept
• Hacker ethic – Wikipedia
• Steven Levy – Wikipedia
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution — Steven Levy
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – Wikipedia
• Enshittification – Wikipedia
• DEF CON 31 – An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Ensh*ttification – Cory Doctorow – YouTube
• German Constitutional Court strikes down predictive algorithms for policing – Euractiv
• CCC | The 38th Chaos Communication Congress: Illegal Instructions
• Announcing Nextcloud Hub 9!
• Nextcloud Enterprise Day 2024 – November 6 in Frankfurt

The post Constanze Kurz: mass surveillance, Snowden, and the future of digital politics appeared first on Nextcloud.

At Nextcloud, we believe that everybody deserves privacy. We released the first open-source AI assistant that is hosted where you want it to be. It can get a multitude of tasks done inside your content collaboration platform without compromising your data: in content writing, mail communication, team chats, and more.

Introducing Nextcloud AI Assistant

Nextcloud AI Assistant is a capable and versatile tool that enhances your work throughout Nextcloud Hub to keep writing, communication, and other productivity tasks simple and low effort.

Unlike other AI-powered content collaboration tools, Nextcloud doesn’t share your data with a third party technology provider to train the core AI model. This means that all data you work with, including documents, emails, chats and more, stays yours.

Nextcloud AI Assistant features are available in the main Nextcloud Hub navigation to help you with quick text tasks, and in several apps including Text, Mail, and soon Talk, for app-specific actions.

If you want to read about other AI tools available in Nextcloud, we welcome you to read the AI features overview or visit our documentation portal.

Quick access from your navigation bar

Whatever you are working on, Nextcloud AI Assistant is only one click away. Should you need any help with a small task like generating a headline, paraphrasing a text, or translating a sentence, just click on a icon on the top right corner of the main navigation and give the Assistant its input.

More and more tools are tools are supported with every new version of Nextcloud Hub. Make sure to check out the Nextcloud Hub 9 release blog to find the latest features!

Chat with Nextcloud Assistant

Nextcloud Assistant becomes even more convenient with a chat interface, where you can give prompts and ask questions in a dialog format. It will remember your conversations, making interactions more natural and smooth. Chat about your day, work on the next press release, or proofread your social media posts — locally on your server and without any data leaks!

Ask it about your own assets

You can ask Nextcloud Assistant aout your own data with Context Chat. To answer questions about your documents and assets, Nextcloud Assistant gets access to data from different apps, for example Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Collectives and even the Analytics app. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.

Here you can enter your prompt.

You can optionally choose what documents should be used

And here are the results!`

Texts written your way

Context Write is another feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell Nextcloud Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes of a discussion, or the transcript generated from a video call in Talk, as well as a report that looks like the one you would like to create. The Assistant goes to work and creates a report similar to your reference – now review it, and done!

Translate with AI

AI translation is available directly from Nextcloud Assistant menu. Translation options are now almost limitless, as we added support for hundreds of languages that app can detect, read and translate to.

Language assistance in Nextcloud Text

With help of the AI Assistant, Text has you covered when it comes to perfecting your writing and text composition. The tool is available right in the text, freeing you from distractions and extra tab journeys.

Summaries, replies and reminders in Nextcloud Mail

The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes bulky email threads for you, so you save a hefty amount of time when searching back in your conversations in Mail. All given tasks, suggestions, and questions are displayed in a clear and concise way, so you get an accurate idea of the whole history of communication.

Nextcloud Assistant also generates quick reply suggestions to your incoming emails based on the email texts, letting you quickly respond to them.

Nextcloud Assistant can also check emails to see if the sender expects a reply: If it determines an email needs a follow-up, it will place it in a Follow up section to make sure you don’t forget!

Automatic event creation in Nextcloud Calendar

You can create Calendar events from your emails right in the Nextcloud Mail app. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even the event agenda. No more going back and forth to set up meetings and reminders!

Smart communication in Talk

Nextcloud Assistant is integrated seamlessly in Nextcloud Talk. We designed it to augment your work conversations and help your team in brainstorming, planning, and clearly expressing ideas.

First and foremost, the Assistant will make sure your discussions flow freely with the ability to translate messages, write texts, and generate media as you chat. Some of those features are available through Smart Picker (type “/” and see the magic!).

However, we don’t plan to stop there and we want the Assistant to become a real participant in the conversation. We are gifting the bot the ability to communicate with you in a most human way possible by answering your questions and providing helpful suggestions for the issues on your agenda. For example, you can ask the Assistant to outline an event preparation plan or to draft a marketing campaign for you using real inputs from your very tasks.

Processing data completely on your server

In everything we do, Nextcloud commits to transparency and trust. Working hard to combine comfort with responsible handling of your data, we made all core AI apps in Hub, including the Nextcloud AI Assistant, fully open-source and running locally on your server.

Your data belongs to you, and not a single bit of information is shared with a third party provider to improve performance, study user behavior, or train an AI model.

You may still want to use popular services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and we are giving you the freedom to do so in Nextcloud. Before making your decision, you can refer to the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating to find out more about how available AI apps in Nextcloud handle your data and estimate the risks related to code availability, deployment options, and access to training data.

Sovereign AI-as-a-Service

We have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.

The future: dedicated AI for public sector and more

AI is a quickly developing field. One technology that will be important going forward are text generation models optimized for specific tasks. One example is the public sector where employees are working with large amounts of complicated forms.

Together with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Nextcloud is working to build a digitally sovereign AI model. Its aim is to accelerate the bureaucratic processes in the public sector with ethical AI-powered content collaboration tools.

The project focuses on crafting a large language model tailored to the specific needs of the offices dealing with state affairs, namely creation of highly standardized texts using accepted language style and wording, optimized search of process-specific information, and other tasks. Anonymized training data provided by the state will be used in its training.

The model in-the-making will be released as Open Source to encourage the adaptation of sovereign, ethical AI within the digitalization strategies of the governments. Context Chat feature, for example, is the first result of our collaboration.

There will be other fine-tuned AI models for Nextcloud appearing over the coming months and years, helping employees in all kinds of specializations with their tasks.

Get Nextcloud Hub

AI-powered content collaboration platform that keeps you in control of your data.

Get Nextcloud Hub

The post Meet the first open-source AI assistant that doesn’t prey on your data appeared first on Nextcloud.